Ryder was gone when Jim and Leo drove up to the house. On the kitchen table he’d left a note under a half-full Pabst bottle.

Guess I’ll go dust off the wedding tux. Call me if you want to play.

Uncle Ride

Jim had said only one thing on the drive home and that was when they pulled up onto Paper Boulevard, all lit up with street lamps and the light from the theater: “Damned baby-killing bastards.” Now he took the note from Leo’s hands and crumpled it up.

Leo let out a long breath. The newspaper was on the table and the front-page story was about another big war protest down in New York City. Jim walked into the parlor and began tuning up his Dobro. Leo leaned back against the fridge and closed his eyes. He couldn’t remember ever feeling this tired. His arms and legs were concrete and he couldn’t stand up straight. He heard the squeak of Jim’s capo, then the slide of the finger thimble up the neck. Leo pulled the kitchen light string and headed down the hallway to his room. Before he got there, Jim stopped tuning. “I don’t want you going near that family again. You hear?”

Leo thought of Chick coming home tomorrow, of his wife’s cheerful voice telling Leo that he would, cheerful because she knew where Allie had been all day, what she was doing.

“Leo?”

“Yeah, I hear.”

Jim was quiet, his guitar stool squeaked, then he launched right into a fast and heated “How Come Hell Came Calling, Lord? How Come?”

Leo left the door open. He lay down on his bed without taking off his sneakers, and he was asleep before Jim hit the first refrain.

29

Thursday was hot and dry and sunny. No rain, no floods, Not even a cloud. The sky was a mammoth blue that Leo tried to admire from the roof of the old job site, the job they’d all abandoned, but when he looked for too long he felt the house move beneath him and he had to squat right away to keep from falling. Twice that happened and twice he pictured Allie sitting at his bedside holding his hand as he lay there with his legs wrapped in plaster.

No one had asked him to lay shingles on the new roof, and he wasn’t even sure he was doing it right, but no way in red hell was he going to sit around Saunders Hill Road all day after last night. He was awake before Jim this morning but didn’t get up until his father was gone, the house creaking, the birds down on the river chirping up a frenzy. He drank the last of Jim’s coffee, then walked out of the house in the same clothes and sneakers he’d slept in. He swung his arms in a march as he went, and he was past downtown and through the bridge in no time. He knew where he was going and it wasn’t the Donovans’. As he passed Spoon Hill, he glanced up it for just a second. Their cabin used to look good in the early light, the logs pinkish, the porch dark, the windows darker, everything inside warm and loving. But there was nothing in there now except coolness and no caring at all.